Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
L. E. L.
-
Standard Name: L. E. L.
Birth Name: Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Pseudonym: L.
Pseudonym: L. E. L.
Used Form: LEL
Used Form: L.E.L.
LEL was one of the most prolific and popular authors of her day. She produced an immense corpus of poetry, several works of fiction (the first a particularly striking silver fork novel), and considerable review and editorial work. Her work more than any other popularized the persona of the lovelorn, doomed poetess in the early nineteenth century.
In London after her father's death, Jane Webb was a frequent visitor to the family of John Martin the artist. His wife, Susan Martin, had special motherly friendship for Jane, shared to some degree...
Friends, Associates
Elizabeth Isabella Spence
EIS
says that her early friendship with Jane
and Anna Maria Porter
was inherited, developing from the friendship between their parents,
Spence, Elizabeth Isabella. Letters from the North Highlands, During the Summer 1816. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown.
325-6
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
under Anna Maria Porter
which had been formed, no doubt, in Durham. In...
Friends, Associates
Rosina Bulwer Lytton, Baroness Lytton
Their mother was living in Paris at this time, and Rosina lived in London with her uncle Sir John Doyle
(latterly without her sister, who joined their mother in Paris). She reputedly had an unusual...
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
She now met the Chorley
family, Shelton Mackenzie
of the Dublin University Magazine, and other figures in Liverpool literary society. She presumably...
Friends, Associates
Rosina Bulwer Lytton, Baroness Lytton
But though she lived remote from London, she corresponded with writers such as L. E. L.
and Jane Welsh Carlyle
.
Devey, Louisa. Life of Rosina, Lady Lytton. Swan Sonnenschein, Lowery, http://U. of Toronto.
143
Blain, Virginia. “Rosina Bulwer Lytton and the Rage of the Unheard”. The Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol.
53
, No. 3, pp. 210-36.
232-3
Her women friends stood by her during her husband's various persecutions.
Health
Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington
She was under considerable financial pressure as a result not only of her large entertainments but of dependent family members, pensioned servants, and others whom she aided, including the mother of L.E.L.
She wrote to...
Intertextuality and Influence
Frances Trollope
FT
's years of literary success were marked by tragedy: she lost two of her children to consumption, and eventually lost a third.
Nadel, Ira Bruce, and William E. Fredeman, editors. Dictionary of Literary Biography 21. Gale Research.
21: 324
Heineman, Helen. Mrs. Trollope: The Triumphant Feminine in the Nineteenth Century. Ohio University Press.
135
However, her writing brought her into a supportive network...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anne Thackeray Ritchie
The Blackstick Papers treat a wide range of topics; three of the thirteen concern women writers, and the book's frontispiece is from a miniature of Felicia Hemans
. ATR
notes the stoicism
Ritchie, Anne Thackeray. Blackstick Papers. Books for Libraries Press.
The starting-point for the poem is the tradition (subtly questioned) of Sappho's suicide as an abandoned woman; this fact links the text to other responses to the topic by other women poets including Felicia Hemans
Intertextuality and Influence
Fanny Aikin Kortright
FAK
's literary allusions here are interesting. Thomas Hood
's The Song of the Shirt is cited more than once, though Kortright insists that the governess is worse off than the seamstress because she is...
Intertextuality and Influence
Sappho
Elizabeth Moody
engagingly converts Sappho
into a contemporary in Sappho Burns her Books and Cultivates the Culinary Arts, 1798.
Jay, Peter, and Caroline Lewis. Sappho Through English Poetry. Anvil Press Poetry.
98
But many women poets accepted the notion of her rejected love for Phaon: Robinson
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Byron
and Wordsworth
were important poetic influences. Books that Elizabeth Barrett owned and kept until her death included Philip James Bailey
's Festus, A Poem, a major text of the spasmodic school, L. E. L.
In a critical preface HS
reveals her gender though not her name. She opens by invoking the author of Rienzi (either, Mary Russell Mitford
or Edward Bulwer Lytton
). The two groups of lovers and...
Intertextuality and Influence
Felicia Hemans
The volume takes its epigraphs and historical starting-points from a wide range of sources, including major male Romantics—Wordsworth
, Byron
, Coleridge
, Goethe
, Schiller
—and lesser-known contemporaries including women—Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger
Timeline
No timeline events available.
Texts
L. E. L.,. The Vow of the Peacock. Editor Sypher, Francis Jacques, Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1997.
L. E. L.,. The Works of L.E. Landon. E. L. Carey and A. Hart, 1838.
L. E. L., and Emma Roberts. The Zenana. Fisher, 1839.
L. E. L.,. Traits and Trials of Early Life. H. Colburn, 1836.
Hill, Isabel et al. “Translator’s Preface; Madame de Staël”. Corinne; or, Italy, translated by. Isabel Hill and L. E. L., A. L. Burt, 1857, p. iii - iv; v-xxi.
